There is what happened, and then there is the story of it, the “required repetition of the good story over and over again to friends, family, more officials.” In Dog Days, her memoir of living in the wake of a terrifying event, Emily LaBarge recounts watching people react to her story—what she calls, varyingly, “the good story, It, That Awful Thing That Happened, That Christmas, The Incident, What Your Family Went Through, The Thing, The Home Invasion, and sometimes—though rarely, as it seems too explicit, sometimes embarrassing, which victimhood, because it is helpless, often feels—The Trauma.” Some cannot believe it. Some shrug her off, don’t call her back. Some say they are traumatized by what happened to her and they themselves “will never feel safe again.”
“Some,” she writes, in disbelief, “cry!!” Some fish for details, trying to suss out whether LaBarge was raped. “Imagine,” she writes, “asking someone, casually, as if it were the ultimate salacious detail. They think it is their business, that it is information they are entitled to.” Sylvia Plath called these people “the peanut-crunching crowd” in her poem of death and resurrection, “Lady Lazarus.” In drafts of this book, LaBarge writes, she tried holding off, leaving the big story until the end—but that was “too coy”—and she tried not telling it at all, subsuming it as criticism or philosophy. In the finished version, she neither hides what happened nor accedes to demands for salacious detail.
What happened is this: In the days before Christmas in 2009, when LaBarge was in her mid-twenties, she and her family were renting a house on a “low-lying coral island in the Atlantic Ocean where the waters are cyan, turquoise, azure blue and the sand is the finest pink-flecked white.” Eight men broke in and held the family hostage for seven hours. They had been watching Mrs. Doubtfire when it happened, and the movie, absurdly, continued to play as they were lying there, until, eventually, one of the men switched it off, putting on, instead, a CD of hymns, liturgical chants, and songs for a death mass. “He doesn’t want anyone to be able to hear us,” LaBarge realizes, “when we XXX or XXXX or XXXXX or X.”
Whole pages unfold like this, details marked with X’s, lines blacked out. These gaps are a refusal to perform what Plath called “the big strip tease” for the detail-hungry gawker, but they are also the gaps in a glitching memory. “I did not hear them coming,” LaBarge writes of the men as they broke in. “Maybe I heard them coming. I did. I did not.” She remembers being hurt by a therapist who left a detailed email unread for too long and then responded with too little, but when, in the process of writing this book, she looks back at her inbox to confirm her recollection, she sees that, actually, the therapist had sent a long and loving response in less than 24 hours. She remembers the layout of the vacation home on the island, but when she looks for it later, she can’t find a house that matches.
But certain things stick. As Fauré’s Requiem plays, while she lies on the floor with her family, it begins to sound, to LaBarge, like “a family death mass. The End.” As soon as she thinks this, she “cannot not think this.” This is a memoir about what happens after The End—what happens when you feel like you’ve died, and what happens when you go on living anyway, about how trauma repeats and reverberates. “It might change your life, you might survive, and then what?” LaBarge asks. What happens, that is, after a resurrection? LaBarge is not religious, but she is fascinated by Jesus, by his encounter with Mary Magdalene in the garden after he rises from the dead, just as she is fascinated by Plath’s nine-lived Lady Lazarus, by Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life—all stories of people who live on after death; who die, but not quite (“But I already died,” LaBarge tells a friend who warns that hard partying will kill her, “almost, I mean, almost”).
“We survive, we do,” LaBarge writes, “but The End comes again and again, comes at surprising times, unbidden and with great force, summoned by images, asides, happenstance, like an errant punctuation mark—why does this sentence have two colons?—that splits time, kaleidoscopic, in multiple directions at once.” Trauma estranges LaBarge, or me, or you, or any person from oneself; it makes grammar, syntax, and form strange. Dog Days, a fusion of memoir, criticism, psychoanalysis, and even scientific theory, makes this stuttering sensation its structuring principle, as the book changes forms and perspectives, doubles back. It is less about what happened to her than how she might tell it; about the mysterious, alchemical process of writing, the transubstantiation of living into language.
After The Incident, LaBarge recalls talking to a friend of her mother’s on the phone. The friend tells her it is “an amazing story,” that she can write about it and get rich; other writers, after all, have done that, capitalizing on the worst things that ever happened to them. “I remember thinking that’s crazy,” LaBarge writes. “No way will I ever write this story.”
And yet, of course, here it is, in our hands. “Why do some of us need to take notes, try to piece things together, want to know what it all means?” she wonders, and she wonders, too, what is the cost of all this. She quotes a Lorrie Moore story about a writer whose child has renal cancer. “Take notes,” her husband tells her. “We are going to need the money.” She takes notes, this writer, but she cannot think of what is happening—the illness, the cost of care—as a story. The story ends with a blunt demand: “There are the notes. Now where is the money?” LaBarge, taking her own notes, wants to know what the price is, what is the value, of the worst thing that ever happened to you. She is aware that “the non-fiction writer has a Faustian bargain with the page, which promises meaning if life—sometimes her own—is adequately harvested for experience.” This is what writers do; they try to transform life into “words, sentences, paragraphs, make it last forever.”
Perhaps what LaBarge recoils from, then, on that phone call, is not the writing but the story. Trauma is “a narrative problem because there is no story”—it is an absence, endlessness, a derangement of action and consequence—but at the same time, she writes, “I do not believe there is anything language cannot do.” Trauma, LaBarge suggests, is not unwritable or unreadable, “in spite of the constant emphasis on the ‘unspeakable’ aspects of trauma.” The problem is the demand to make the experience of trauma neat, narrative, acceptable. She quotes the historian Paul Fussell, who wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory that “we have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.” This is the obverse, in some ways, to the problem of the peanut-crunchers; there are things people do not, really, want to know.
LaBarge is a stunningly talented critic and a gifted close reader, a practice that becomes central to her life in the years after That Awful Thing That Happened. She seeks comfort in stories “in which it seems as though something undefinable is missing, has been lost, in which there is some shapeless hole to be filled,” but she also searches the world for portents, a way of fending off fear. The trees scold her, and birds follow her, screeching ominously. She inexplicably hears classical music on the escalator down to the tube station and thinks it is trying to tell her something. She sees people she knows on the street, spying on her, but they dissolve into unknown faces on a second look.
Dog Days lends itself to exactly this kind of paranoid reading, not only describing but enacting the magical thinking of trauma survivors. In an extended analysis of Nabakov’s short story “Signs and Symbols,” about exactly this tendency to search for meaning, she asks, “What does it mean that the mother accidentally drops three specific playing cards to the floor, the knave of hearts, the nine of spades, the ace of spades?” A handful of pages earlier, she has recounted a tarot card reading someone did for her. “The card turned up for me—was it the Page of Wands? The Two of Coins? The Fool?” These are cards that speak to change and chaos, chance and possibility, innocence and exposure. What does it mean?
La Barge writes that she reconceived this book “at least three times before starting and at least three times as it unfolds.” She tries writing it straight, she tries writing it beautifully, she tries not writing about The Thing at all. “I think,” she writes, “that if I see it plotted out correctly I will know, that gut feelings, and the container will give meaning to chaos or at least hold it in place.” It is an alluring and impossible idea, that the narrative problem of trauma can be solved, that order can be restored. She wants to know “how to accept this and move on without losing my mind or the part of me that believes in humanity, safety, hope, ha, right, trust, intimacy, connection, bodily integrity, justice, compassion. How did I ever believe in so many fake and stupid things, and how do I continue in a world of people who still do?”
This search takes the form of a search for a form; the book is a restless experiment in ways of telling, by turns hectic and languorous, echoing the dilations of time LaBarge experiences in the wake of That Christmas. She details the drafting of the Schedule of Loss—the “official title for what must be given to an insurance company or any kind of court or tribunal issues with loss compensation. Laptop, clothes, jewelry, books, dignity, mind.” She recounts her newly sleepless nights and faltering memory, her investigation into one of the hostage-takers’ whereabouts, her obsessive search for a way to make sense of a world she can no longer see in the same light. She writes digressively, essayistically, about the moon and the stars. Part of the book takes on a screenplay-like form, with lines and stage directions (“It sounds like a movie!” those she tells the good story to often say, grotesquely—and yet, LaBarge does think to herself, surveying the wrecked aftermath of the house on the unnamed island in the Atlantic, that it looks like a film). Trauma is a narrative problem because it does not have a story’s beginning-middle-end; The End goes on and on. It scrambles chronology as the book scrambles form and perspective.
“I do not remember some things that happened in the first person,” LaBarge writes, “I only remember them in the second, third, omniscient, limited.” The book, fittingly, moves between these modes; LaBarge is sometimes Daughter, sometimes Sister, sometimes I. She breaks into second-person address toward the end of the book. “You remember a friend telling you” about someone else who was also robbed at gunpoint on the same island in the Atlantic, a startling sign that even the most singular experiences are shared. “You read books about domestic abuse, child abuse, veterans with PTSD, survivors of genocide,” she writes, “and feel guilty for identifying even vaguely with their terminologies, though you cannot find any others to learn about your own experience.” This guilt is natural, but unhelpful. “You prefer empathy to individualism.”
The movement to You reflects the distortions of traumatic memory that LaBarge describes, and it also reflects what she comes to see as the collective, interpersonal nature of trauma. While trauma feels profoundly isolating, in attempting to make sense of it, she finds herself always in association with other people, both as she searches for ways to understand her experience through the stories of others and because, when she does tell this story, it is always being told to someone else. This move into the second person, then, is an extension of her method of processing trauma through art, literature, and film. “If you”—yes, you!—“can’t see, for instance, that you’re already dead, that you died with six-year-old Hind Rajab, shot to death with 335 bullets as she waited hours in a car, surrounded by dead family members, for the paramedics to arrive,” LaBarge writes, “then you have to stay here, in the old world,” the world of linear time, of a knowable self, of a good story.
The alternative, for LaBarge, is to choose not to be “singular, individual, alone, in spite of this state so profoundly defining the experience of trauma.” Instead, one might choose to be radically connected to others, to listen to their stories and to see oneself in them. Language, LaBarge writes, “is representational but it is also relational.” It is, fundamentally, a means of communication, and the limits of what it can do are the limits of “what can be heard, what can be tolerated, what can be borne by both teller and told.” We have a duty, she seems to say, to listen and to witness, to choose not to seal ourselves off, alone. This is the path out of the old world, into the new. The End. And then what?
